I do enjoy reunions, and that includes reunions of several kinds. I was first exposed to a reunioning family when I was a young boy. The Nichols family was very much a reunion-loving family, especially when combined with our Springdale kinfolk, the extended Holcombe family of Springdale and Elm Springs, Ark. My mother also loved to go to gospel singings, which were big social events in the 1940s and 1950s, often featuring "dinner-on-the-grounds" and singing in the afternoon. Some were even all night events, and all day singings. We couldn't go for those long events because our cows had to be milked and we had other farm chores that had to be done every day. Those singings were very much reunions of friends and acquaintances, often drawing people from northwest Arkansas, southwest Missouri and northeast Oklahoma. Some of the friendships developed through the years at singings and singing conventions were long enduring friendships, often enduring for a lifetime. Many of those friends came to be like "family" and friends loved friends like family as they sang together and worshiped together across the years.
Some of the churches our family had a connection to liked to have annual reunions, or reunions on a regular schedule, like every five years, or every 10 years. In earlier years, we also had several identifiable local rural communities around us, often focused around one-room rural schools, and those communities often involved socializing together, having potluck dinners, celebrating local happenings, weddings, birthdays, anniversaries and so on. Our family was part of the Shady Grove Community which was centered on the old Shady Grove schoolhouse located just a few miles northwest of Pea Ridge on Arkansas Highway 94.
The Shady Grove School building still stands, even today in 2016, nearly 100 years after it was built new in 1922. Many people of the Shady Grove community called the schoolhouse "SCUD." I have never yet found anyone who can tell me just why SCUD? I have wondered if the letters may have been "SGUD" for Shady Grove Unified District; but I have never found any written documentation for that idea. Even older Shady Grove folks like Russell Walker did not know just why it was called SCUD. Russell and his brothers were among the last to attend school at Shady Grove. Russell attended Shady Grove School through the sixth grade until 1929. His last teacher there was Fay Price, who went on to teach Pea Ridge Elementary classes for many, many years.
In 1929, Shady Grove School was consolidated with Pea Ridge School, and Russell attended seventh grade in the old Pea Ridge College building during the 1929-30 school year. The new 1930 Pea Ridge School building replaced the old college building in 1930. The year 1929 also saw the closing of several other of the outlying Pea Ridge rural schools and community centers. That included Sassafras School northeast of town, Cross Lanes School out east on Lee Town Road and Possum Trot School southwest of Pea Ridge. Other stronger rural schools endured longer: Central School at Lee Town and Twelve Corners School at Twelve Corners were open through 1948, and Bayliss School continued through the early 1950s. In communities like these, people get to know each other and become quite close, and reunions bring people together again in very enjoyable ways.
I must have inherited some of my love for reunions from the matriarchs and patriarchs of our family. Within our family, my Grandmother Ellen Holcombe Nichols, and my Grand-Aunt Bessie Nichols Holcombe were big family reunion promoters. In their early years, they had been across-the-road neighbors on farms at Elm Springs. Bessie Nichols ended up marrying Frank Holcombe, Ellen Holcombe's brother, and Ellen Holcombe married Scott Nichols, Bessie Nichols's brother. The two sets of brothers and sisters were very much in cahoots all their lives, and one result was our great family reunions taking place almost every summer, throughout their lives. Sometimes those great family reunions were held at the Holcombe Farm at Elm Springs, sometimes at Grandma and Grandpa Nichols's house in Pea Ridge, and sometimes at our house on the farm. During summer vacation times, we would have Nichols cousins visiting from California and Holcombe and Shepherd cousins from Chicago and Springdale. We cousins always seemed to get along well together. We enjoyed playing kids games, showing our city relatives the farm life that they were missing, having picnics, going swimming, going to Lake Atalanta Park, and generally having a good time. I was severely bashful in my early life. I always think our reunions helped me to get beyond bashfulness and to come to enjoy people in a great way.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. The opinions expressed are those of the author. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@century tel.net, or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 08/03/2016